Whoa, it's a blog-a-versary!

A cheery "Hello!" to anyone still following after my unscheduled hiatus from blogging. Life got busy, followed by a creative slump, then I had some issues with what I think was a disc problem in my neck that kept me from crafting comfortably when I start feeling that urge to create, and now we've had a busy summer filled with the usual summer activities, home improvement projects, visits to relatives.... etc. You get the picture, I'm sure. :-)

Anyway, I absolutely HAD to post since I knew that I'd started this blog back in July of 2006, never dreaming that I'd keep it going this long. I appreciate all of the messages that I've received from folks who were wondering if I'd quit blogging or who were just checking up to see if things were okay over here. Crafters are such a lovely community of people. :-)

I still haven't been crafting much lately. We've been working on my girls' "shrine" to dance. They've both danced since they were not quite three years old--they're now 13 and 15. Each year they'd dance in a recital and each year they'd have professional photos taken in costume. All of those photos had been sitting in a nice stack in a cabinet. The individual 8x10 photos are now in albums. Yay! That wasn't so bad. Finding the albums and pages for them was the toughest part.

The bigger part of the project has been tackling the group pictures. For each number that they danced in, they have a photo of the group. Early on, it was usually just one photo/year. Now that they perform in more numbers, they're in more photos. Last year they were in nine of them. So, over the course of 12 years of dance, we'd accumulated 46 photos. It seemed a shame to have them just sitting in the envelopes in the cabinet, and the girls wanted to use them to decorate their dance space in the basement where they have a mirrored wall and a dance barre.

We pulled down the old Spongebob, Barbie, and Scooby Doo posters and decided that we had a large enough space that we could put the photos in frames and somehow artfully hang them. I was excited to find that Target had those packaged pairs of very simple frames for 8x10 photos in various colors for only $6 USD. After raiding most of my local stores for those black frames, we decided that a mix of black and silver frames would be okay, since I couldn't find enough of just the black ones. Then came the labor-intensive pulling of photos, labeling the backs with songs, years, dancers' names, and placing them in the frames. I was thrilled to find that our photo collection was complete! I was sure that we'd be missing some.

But then came the hanging issue. It was going to be tricky, eh? That's a large number of photos, plus we know that we'll be adding to them. It was daunting to think of using picture hangers and trying to keep any semblance of order with that many photos--imagine just trying to hang them in straight lines or trying to keep each one straight over time. Yikes! This is when it pays to have a husband who loves woodworking and doing home improvement projects himself. He came up with a way to mount the photos in a wood framework on the wall that would still allow us to have fairly easy access to them, as needed. They slide in from the sides on a narrow ledge and are held in by a narrow lip at the top and bottom edges. All I had to do was paint all of those wooden pieces black. I think it turned out great! Much better than trying to measure and place hangers for 46 photos.



Okay, since the really astute among you would probably notice that there are only 42 photos displayed, we do have another partial row to put up. Just haven't gotten to that yet.

So, no cards and no nifty tricks or tips for using embossing folders or any other tools today. I do have some of the new stuff and want to play with it. When I do, I'll post results. Just thought that I'd show you a crafting project of sorts that we'd been working on here at home. :-) And YES! It's a happy celebration of four years of IndigoInklings, even if the posting can be sporadic at times. Thanks for hanging in there with me! :-)